Ask HN: What technology made your jaw drop the first time you used it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What technology made your jaw drop the first time you used it?

27 pointsryankrage7763 comments

For me it would be VR. I put on a VR headset (I think the rift S), and the accuracy of the tracking and the 3D effect had me stunned. Later I bought a Valve Index and every new experience or interaction blows me away.

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The Web - I remember when using a computer changed from a solitary experience to a potentially social one on early web forums and instant messenger.

Napster - just the amount of new and unique music I got to experience (like downloading every smashing pumpkins b side). Whereas before music was so heavily gatekept.

Halo - I remember how radically different the immersive quality of the game was from any FPS perspective game. The approachable mechanics and sandbox feel made it feel like I was exploring a real place.

Minecraft - walking around in odd ways beautiful infinite worlds. In some ways I’ve never felt more scared than survival mode knowing there’s an enderman out there. In some ways it feels like Minecraft gave me a solitary space to “build a cabin” and explore away from the cares of the world

Python - as a C++ developer it was refreshing to find a language that really pushed my productivity and wasn’t lost in all the abstractions of C++

SQL - seeing how you could ask arbitrary questions about normalized data using set operations - all in a language that felt like one big statement, not procedural

I've taken them for granted most of my life, but once I stopped to really think about them, they began to amaze me:

- Clean running water, piped directly into my house, available on-demand.

- The system of technologies that enable me to live in peace while consuming just about any food, product, or information that I desire. It's stupefying to even try and fathom how it all functions, how I and others can consume so many resources, and it's simultaneously disturbing, because I wonder: how much longer can it really last?

Not exactly jaw-dropping, but I thought they were pretty amazing the first time I experienced them:

Virtual Machines (precisely, VMWare).

SSDs

LCD monitor

Amiga 1200 (seeing some amazing demo on it really was mind-blowing)

Action Replay (C64 cartridge which allows you to dump the whole machine's RAM to disk and later reload it, essentially giving you machine's snapshots, e.g. save games for games which didn't have them).

Laser printer

Non-dialup internet connection at home

Torrents (a decentralized sharing network that works and truly can't be pulled down!)

Windows 2000 was super neat compared to the old clunky Win 98

> Windows 2000 was super neat compared to the old clunky Win 98

My dad had a friend with an MSDN subscription, so we got a pre-release developer copy of Windows 95. Moving from Windows 3.11 to that was pretty jaw dropping.

But after a while we had an issue with the machine. Sectors on the hard drive were going bad, so we brought it into a shop to have someone confirm that. When we booted it up in the shop the tech's eyes went wide and I think he started drooling a little bit. He offered to swap the drives and copy all of our data from one to the other for free (I assume he thought he could make a copy of the OS for himself too). We declined and he was pretty crushed.

The Motorola 6809E[1] and the MC6883[2]. The 6809E was a 0.89MHz CPU (with external clock) used in the TRS-80 Color Computer[3] sold by Radio Shack. The MC6883 was the Synchronous Address Multiplexer (SAM) used to drive the display.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_6809

[2] https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Datasheets/M...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer

1. MP3. I had played with audio before (.wav and .rm, for those who remember). The first time I heard the audio quality out of a 4 MB audio .mp3 file was shocking.

2. HDR. I saw a demo monitor back in the early 2000s. It was a 12-inch display with a full array of white LED backlights, individually addressable. They had it running next to a normal monitor and the difference in dynamic range was unbelievable. The company that made that demo unit was ultimately purchased by Dolby.

3. VR. I got a demo of the HTC Vive when it was still pre-market and could not believe the lack of latency and true sense of realism. It was a mind-expanding moment.

Thank you, that reminds me of the Diamond Rio 500 which is on topic here...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_500

> PSP. It introduced me to gaming really and switching on that elegant device for the first time and seeing the intuitive user interface was magic.

> I swear that when I got my 2015 MacBook Pro the Desktop would load instantly when opening the lid and by the time I had released the lid, everything was operational. In hindsight, I am not sure whether I am imagining things because my 2019 MBP is significantly slower and Apple is touting "Instant Wake" as a feature for the M1 MacBooks, but at the time, I was amazed anyway.

OCR - circa 1990.

I worked in a 'traditional' typesetting house and we'd just got in some 300 dpi B&W flatbed scanners and Desktop Publishing was just starting to get 'commercially acceptable'. I scanned in a single spaced page of text in less than 5 seconds with virtually no errors compared to the hour+ it took to get it 'typeset' and output to bromide. It really was like magic.

I definitely agree about VR. The first time I played "Robo Recall" on the Oculus Rift I couldn't believe how responsive and immersive it was.

Tesla... It's not the self driving, but not having to carry a key or start/stop the car is what gave me a virtual jaw drop.

Not exactly jaw-dropping but...when I tried an iPad with an Apple Pen and the Procreate app for the first time, I was hugely impressed by the drawing experience. The pen was smooth, responsive and sensitive to pressure and tilt. This felt like the most natural experience created so far to mimicking the pencil and other mediums from real life.

I never imagined that the iPad would overtake traditional digital drawing tablet screens in the popularity stakes. But today, you would be hard pressed to find an illustrator who doesn't have an iPad and Apple Pen (and a copy of Procreate).

OLED screens. Saw it in a Sony Store on a tiny screen back in 2009(?) and finally got my own 65in LG CX OLED last fall, and every time I use it, I am still blown away by the colors and motion.

The early days of the internet were amazing. Dialing into my Dad's university account via 56k modem in the early 90s, I had access to an astounding amount of quality text-based documents. I did research, read works of fiction, wrote poems and essays, communicated with politicians and scientists, etc all from a simple remote terminal. To my teenager brain, I felt like I discovered secret access to the entirety of human knowledge.

1. e-commerce. I changed the notification sound on my email to play a cash register whenever I made a sale.

I was literally using the internet to make money on things that didn't have to ship.

2. Crazy sharp knives -- in the kitchen and on the worksite. The difference between a dull knife and sharp one gives me the same feeling of, "How did I live like that before?"

TRS80. I was in high school, and I was taking a FORTRAN class. We dropped off a card deck to the teacher, who went twice a week to a mainframe somewhere. So you'd put in your code, get the results half a week later, make a fix, and put in the change a week after you put in the first program.

Then the school got five TRS80s. You could make a change in a minute instead of in a week. That changes some things...

Scanning QR code to sign in. Simple functionality that links an account on a smartphone app to your desktop/other devices by scanning QR code, like Whatsapp. Seems straightforward and I wonder if that can be brought on to authentication frameworks, without us having to deal with usernames and passwords. 'Giving' something access feels cooler than 'requesting' something access.

VR was exciting sure, but Half Life Alyx took it to another level and sorry to say ruined other VR games for me. My index now sits collecting dust in the garage.

The sounds, the textures, the interaction, the bosses, the level where you have to hold your breath to press the elevator button and avoid the monster. It elevated the medium so far beyond anything that exists or is coming, it's sad.

Valve please make more games. :(

   the first computer i ever used
   the first video game i ever saw (gameboy)
   first time i saw a computer render a picture
   first time i saw a computer play a video
   first time i saw a computer play audio
   first time i saw computer talk to another computer
   first graphical web browser
   first laptop i ever saw
   first cellphone i ever owned
   first PDA i ever owned (palm pilot)
   google.com
   ipod
   original sony psx
   nintendo virtual boy
   oculus rift
   unix
   lisp
   kubernetes
   forth
   prolog
   APL
   perl
   python
   cable internet
   dvd player
   machine learning
   deep learning
   PGP
   LXC (linux containers)
   iphone
   raspberry pi
   turbo charger on a car
   voip
   wireless phone charging
   airplane
   GPS navigation
   CD writer
   sd cards
   AR
   wolfestein 3D
   doom
   quake
   descent

   every thing is magic till it becomes familiar

The first time using an iPhone. It was pure astonishment seeing how much better the device was over my previous [dumb]phone.

Parsec. Being able to seamlessly use my home computer from anywhere in the world was pretty jaw dropping for me the first time I used it, it felt no different from using it directly in person. Playing local-only games with friends connecting to my pc from different parts of the country was equally seamless and amazing.

The technology that made my jaw hit the floor hardest was the Super NES, running Mario World. Mine eyes did fall upon it suddenly, at a mall kiosk, when I was 14. I was so used to NES graphics, my brain could not fully process the color depth, resolution, and sprite sizes.

Runners up include iPhone, Oculus Quest 2, and Wolfenstein 3D.

An electronic calculator. Early 1970’s, I think.

Also “Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Simulator” on our office 80286, around 1987.

Funny to think about now with hindsight - but a prototype version of the Magic Leap One.

It was an incredibly novel feeling of seeing the room I was in get mapped out, furniture and all, to see interfaces and 3d models rendered in a way that felt interactable in real space. Moving renders of objects around to see how things could be - well, it was just a lot of fun; it felt like playing with a new video game console as a child.

Sure, the overall experience was clunky, with the motion tracking and sub-par lenses constantly reminding you that it was only a prototype, but that first interaction excites you about all the things that could be possible if it actually is refined into a final product. Perhaps this was the same experience that led many of the early investors to put so much faith in Magic Leap while there was still a long road ahead of them.

Google earth actually is my jaw dropping experience. I can go into places and explore in seconds.

I don’t like it. Some features are neat, but not overwhelming. I was sad, when Picasa went. Panoramio also not working anymore - well im out of the topic.

Tech that blew me away, and the year I first tried/saw them:

- Battle Zone (3D vector graphics arcade game), early 1980s

- The Mosaic browser and World Wide Web, 1993.

- CGI (Jurassic Park), 1993.

- Virtual Reality, SIGGRAPH 1994.

- CUSeeMe video conferencing, 1995.

- Linux, 1995.

- FutureSplash (forerunner of Flash), 1996.

- Palm Pilot, 1997.

- Plasma flatscreen TV, late 90s?

- Apple iPod, 2004.

- Amazon Echo, 2014.

- Virtual Reality again (GoT Oculus demo at SXSW), 2014.

Apple IIc Plus - with Basic - was my first programming experience. Programming a computer blew me away and it's lost a little mystery since then, but is still quite interesting. No tech I've used since has really recaptured the feeling.

Dating myself here. It was the early 80s and I played with an Texas Instruments Speak and Spell. It was an educational toy that spoke or voiced words then I had to enter in the correct spelling. For me it was magic.

The iPhone - light years ahead of what I was using at the time.

Multimedia CDs with video and sound, and in particular multimedia encyclopaedias. That was mind blowing to have all that media in one place and in an interactive format.

The model s in 2013... I never had an acceleration curve feel so smooth in any car before that. From 0 to 60 instant and smooth acceleration. From 60 to 90 instant and smooth acceleration...

Also it was not the first time I used it but maybe after 5 years and some change - vim, it’s the most consistently productive tool I’ve ever used even 20 years later, it’s faster and more productive way for me to move mountains of text then any other editor...

* React. After coming from jQuery, I was floored by the reusability of React.

* 1960s Polaroid cameras. This one is probably quite individual, but I was chuffed the first time I used a classic Polaroid camera (this was only last year). Something about the fact it's 60 year old technology and still quite exciting to witness in person (I can't imagine the reaction of seeing an instant camera in 1965 for the first time).

A high resolution display. first the iPhone 4 then my retina MBP. I can't stand shit displays anymore.

Oculus Rift - The Climb specifically. Put my hand through a drop-ceiling.

Same here except I have the Oculus Quest which I purchased for our family for Christmas. Just the Amazon Prime app and Netflix app were reason enough to buy it for the different viewing experience it provides during these times of spending so much time inside of the house. It really feels like getting out of the house when you watch an Amazon Prime show in a large theatre with a cinematic screen.

First one ever was Expedia CD ROM in college watching JFK give his famous speech. Never seen anything like that from a computer.

Duck Hunt was a memorable second. That gun shooting light amazed a kid.

When I went from using a Toshiba netbook to an original iPad. That thing was so sweet when I first got it. The whole experience was top notch and one of my first touch screens.

3dfx, internet, motorcycle, broadband internet, ssd, tesla

Vacuum robot cleaner.

Man was I sceptic about these things and thought they were just marketing. I bought one a few months ago and it's an amazing piece of technology.

Parabolic skis. It was like a completely different experience making turns on the snow after a couple of decades of straight boards.

Clickhouse. That analytics db is a fucking beast.

Eleven Table Tennis VR.

It's the most immersive experience you can have at the moment, you simply forget it's in VR and not IRL.

For me it's the Gun used in classic nintendo console, I played that game where we shoot ducks and there's dog laughing.

Hololens

As a Developer,

- Google Wave for realtime synchronization

- Hibernate ORM for POJO/Hashmap persistence

- App engine for planetary scale

- Gmail for its AJAX client

For me it was discovering commandline.

I was so amazed by the power of commandline tools and the things you can do

Fax - the idea of sending a document by wire was and still mind-blowing to me.

Google Earth VR. I made so many people try it, almost everyone was amazed.

Nintendo NES

Mac OS (The old Classic OS, on a Mac in 1984 or 1985)

Amiga

UNIX

BBSes

VMWare

iPhone

LASIK

I (glasses on) see what you did there. YEEAAAAAAH!!!

AirPods

A USB flash drive. I could not believe how much storage it had.

When I first used mosaic, also Google when it first appeared

Swift - most advanced programming language

Airport Express

Google earth, then google earth vr.

Amiga 1000

Intel 80387

AirDrop

magnets.

iPhone

Amiga 1000, 1985. Nothing else like it at the time.

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